I PP'ed this before the cut was made since I thought it would make a perfect PP subject with its very cool landscape but with some noise problems and extreme low-key / underexposedness. In the end, this photo did not make it to the final list of ten originals.
Anyway, here's what I did:
1. Loaded using adobe camera raw, doing basic exposure adjustments.
2. Separated stars from the rest of the sky, so I could blur and smear away at the sky without disturbing stars.
I think I did the separation by high pass + threshold, with some extra "despeckle" in between to remove false positives coming from noisy areas.
The "holes in the sky" left by the stars were filled by a median-filtered layer.
3. Then, the real work of hand-smearing the clouds to remove coarse noise began.
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